Tribune theater critic Richard Christiansen very much liked the show (an "extraordinary, quite special entertainment") and wrote that Nussbaum "has a dry, ironic delivery that is just right for Stein; her exquisite delivery of (Stein's poem) 'A Completed Portrait of Picasso' is a highlight of the evening."

I first got to know Nussbaum a couple of years later when she performed in "The Plucky and Spunky Show" at the bygone Remains Theatre.

Nussbaum wrote the play with Mike Ervin, and I saw it many times. It changed forever the way in which I looked at and thought about people with disabilities. It was a series of skits and sketches, touching and hilarious. Starring actors and actresses with disabilities — Nussbaum became disabled in an accident when she was in her 20s — it gave me, no exaggeration, a new view of the world.

So I often sat with Nussbaum after the shows. We would have drinks and talk about writing.

"Writing is such a pain," she would say, repeatedly.

But she continued to write and to act and to direct and to advocate for those with disabilities. The daughter of the esteemed actor/director Mike Nussbaum and his late wife, the delightful Annette, Susan has been a fixture on the local theater scene for decades, as well as doing a great deal of other things, enough to have her included in the 2008 Utne Reader list of "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World" for her work with girls with disabilities.

As smart and sensitive and funny as I found Nussbaum's theatrical writing — and found her to be in person — I was not at all prepared for the depth and beauty of what has consumed her last few years, her first novel, "Good Kings Bad Kings."

Here is some of it: "I eat as much enchilada as I can. Ricky's fajitas are long gone, so I offer him the rest of my dinner and he digs in. For the first time I notice that his face is crooked. He has droopy eyelids with a fat fringe of black lashes and a white scar that runs through his left eyebrow. His hair is black, almost blue, like the way they draw the hair on men in romance comic books. He isn't standard-issue handsome, but he is sexy. I can feel my heart speed up a little just looking at him. Or maybe I am having a heart attack from the refried beans."

There is a great deal going in that paragraph. It's observant. It's funny. It's terrific writing.

The voice there is Joanne Madsen. She is disabled and works as a data entry clerk at what another character describes as the "Illinois Learning something something," a bleak South Side Chicago, state-run repository for children and teens with disabilities.

Madsen is but one of the many voices in the novel, each allowed to guide their own chapters; voices of those living and working in the institution. I could give you bits and pieces of them, but that would spoil the thrill of discovering them.

These are the sort of people that few of us ever meet, the sort of place — and there are no punches pulled about abuses and dark sides here — that we have pushed into society's shadows.

This is a world as foreign to most as another planet. That Nussbaum is able to make it as real and as painful and joyful and alive as she does is a spectacular accomplishment.

I am not alone in my praise.

Novelist Rosellen Brown writes, "The voices that compel (this novel) are so rich with language and feeling that they command the ear and — a word I rarely use — the heart. Her characters' lives are difficult, but miraculously, her novel is all fierce energy and wit, a celebration of strength, dignity, and the cathartic pleasure of telling it like it is."

While still in manuscript, "Good Kings Bad Kings" was awarded the 2012 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, which is supported by an endowment from author Barbara Kingsolver. Nussbaum received $25,000 and a publishing contract with Algonquin Books, which had the novel on store shelves a few weeks ago.

Nussbaum learned of the prize through a phone call from Kingsolver, and she was understandably thrilled.

Kingsolver was too, offering this thought for the book's jacket: "The characters … made me laugh, over and over again, and cry, and cheer. … Simply and breathtakingly honest."

That honesty is what has always characterized Nussbaum's writing for the stage. I do hope she will continue to write for the theater, and perhaps she is in the midst of adapting this novel. It would be difficult, I am sure, but what a play this might make.

But whatever Nussbaum is up to now, I hope she remembers something that Gertrude Stein once said: "To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write."